Home > Author > Suzan-Lori Parks
1 " The plays should have the half-life of plutonium. "
― Suzan-Lori Parks
2 " The writer has two kinds of faith: actual writing and sitting openly. Have faith in your personal effort or sweat. And faith in God, or whatever you want to call it. Then the voices will come. Faith is the big deal. "
3 " And as you walk yr road, as you live yr life, RELISH THE ROAD. And relish the fact that the road of yr life will probably be a windy road. "
4 " you're only yourself when no ones watching! "
― Suzan-Lori Parks , Topdog/Underdog
5 " A play is a blueprint of an event: a way of creating and rewriting history through the medium of literature. Since history is a recorded or remembered event, theatre, for me, is the perfect place to 'make' history--that is, because so much of African-American history has been unrecorded, dismembered, washed out, one of my tasks as a playwright is to--through literature and the special strange relationship between theatre and real-life--locate the ancestral burial ground, dig for bones, find bones, hear the bones sing, write it down. "
― Suzan-Lori Parks , The America Play and Other Works
6 " Everybody's got a Hole. Ain't nobody ever lived who don't got a Hole in them somewheres. When I say Hole you know what I'm talking about, dontcha? Soft spot, sweet spot, opening, blind spot, Itch, Gap, call it what you want but I call it a Hole. To get the best of a situation you gotta know a man's Hole. Everybody's got one, just don't everybody got one in the same place. Some got a Hole in they head. Now, you may think "Hole in the head" is just another way of saying stupid, but "Hole in the head" means more than that. It means they got a lack and a craving for knowledge. Not just the lack, now, but the craving too. A man could have a Hole just about anywheres: in the head, in the wallet (which means he burns his money), in the pocket (which means he don't got no money to burn but would like some), in the pants, in the guts, in the stomach, in the heart. You offer a person with a Hole in the head some knowledge and they gonna be in yr pocket cause you done gived him the opportunity to taste what he craves, but if a person's got a Hole in they heart and you offer them knowledge, you won't be able to sway them none. A Hole-in-the-heart person craves company and kindness, not no book. "
7 " History is time that won't quit. "
8 " Overweight southern senators are easy targets. They too easily become focal points of all evil, allowing the arts community to willfully ignore our own bigotry, our own petty evils, our own intolerance which--evil senators or no--will be the death of the arts. "
9 " I’m gonna take your mother back to Lincoln,” I says. “I’m gonna get her a new coffin, a nice one, and a nice angel headstone. I’ll put her in the ground real good and all at my expense.” I expect Billy to smile or say thank you or something but she is looking hard at the wrapped quilt, thinking. There’s a part of the dress, just a little bit of the hem "
― Suzan-Lori Parks , Getting Mother's Body
10 " Folks take after they folks. That’s the law of nature. The thing about not watching my mother get old is that I wasn’t never sure what I was gonna get, cause if you don’t got your folks to look at, if all you got is a little picture of a woman standing beside a cactus, a picture took by a man who weren’t even your daddy, then you don’t got a good idea really of where yr headed. When I seen her bones I knew what we all knew, that we’s all gonna end up in a grave someday, but there’s stops in between there and now. Right now I got my first child running around in the yard and another one on the way. Five years from now Laz gives me Mother’s diamond ring back. He’d never sold it in Dallas. The money he brought back was from his savings. Dill’s hog farm is going pretty good. Uncle Teddy’s got another church. There’s lots of things between now and them bones. "
11 " At least Billy won't be traveling alone. It ain't safe out there for a Negro gal. It's 1963 and a Negro life is cheap. The life of a Negro man is cheap. The life of a Negro woman is cheaper. The price of everything is always going up though, so could be that the price of a Negro life too will get high. Maybe the price'll rise to reach the value of the cost we brought in slavery times. Not this year though. Not the next. Maybe by nineteen hundred and seventy. Maybe by nineteen hundred and eighty or nineteen hundred and ninety the price will go up. Maybe by the year two thousand, but surely, the world will end by then. "
12 " This next song I'ma sing is a song I wrote about a man I used to know. It's called "Big Hole Blues."My man is digging in my dirtDigging a hole just for me.He's digging in my dirtDigging a big hole just for me. It's as long as I am tall, goes down as deep as the deep blue sea. He says the hole he's digging is hole enough for two. He says the hole he's digging is hole enough for two. He says he'll put me down there in itAnd put my boyfriend in it too. He says he's just pulling my leg, but I go to play it safe. He says he's just pulling my leg, but I go to play it safe. I done packed up all my clothes, I'm gonna leave this big old holey place. "
13 " He sported this style in the early war years. Years of uncertainty. When he didn't know if the war was right when it could be said he didn't always know which side he was on not because he was a stupid man but because it was sometimes not 2 different sides at all but one great side surging toward something beyond either Northern or Southern. "
― Suzan-Lori Parks , The America Play
